Challenges of the Knowledge Society (Jun 2016)
THE GLOBAL MARKET OF SMALL BUSINESSES BY E-COMMERCE PLATFORMS
Abstract
Nowadays we live in a global market era. For small businesses (SBs), that do not have financial and human resources, to sell in a big market by an e-commerce platform can be a competitive strategy. The electronic platform can reinforce the weaknesses of an absence of a commercial network to interact with end customers, especially if they live in another country. The platform allows small businesses to operate on the long tail. In fact they can sell also few specific products /services to a large number of people in a global context. Obviously, in economic terms, Small Businesses cannot compete with the big ones that can have most advanced technology and software for information processing. However, for SBs the reduced availability of resources is not an impediment to sell in a global market. Owners of SBs can directley spend and devote part of their free time to support the online sale. Being lean and flexible enterprises they can execute more quickly orders, collected by the website, and therefore the distribution process is more fast. In the paper we describe a research on e-commerce in a small companies sample and in particular an analisys of websites and interviews, in dept, to entrepreneurs.
